


sunlight

by Anonymous



Series: the dead and the dreaming [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Depression, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22601785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: You dream that you are in a canyon on a distant planet, where the sunlight doesn't burn.
Relationships: John Egbert/Karkat Vantas
Series: the dead and the dreaming [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1630873
Kudos: 6
Collections: Anonymous





	sunlight

For about a sweep now, you've felt like something important has passed you by.

You're seven now, and your eyes are starting to fill in with red. Where your friends have all gotten taller, more graceful and more dangerous, their horns spiraling up or out into impressive crests of bone, you are more or less the same as you were at six—small, unremarkable, and unimpressive. Your horns are still pathetic little stubs that barely make it through the mess of your hair. You don't know if all mutants are stunted in this department and this is simply part of the whole shitty package, or if mutants generally have normal horns and this particular misfortune is just your own shitty luck. It figures that you would be the one guy unlucky enough to be a genetic abnormality punishable by death and badly-endowed on top of that.

This feeling of having missed something important hits you at strange times; standing in your mealsblock, or watching a movie, or just as you’re falling asleep. Things happen that you think remind you of something, but you can’t remember what. You get the feeling that there was some missed moment in your past, something terrible on the horizon that at the last minute passed you over and left you empty.

Something about the life you live now feels more hollow than it did before. You’re more aware than ever of the noxious blood that crawls through your veins, something that will get you culled if it doesn’t kill you by itself first. At least, you think it will. You’ve always had this idea that mutants have shorter lifespans than even rustbloods, although you’re not entirely sure where that came from or if it’s even true. When it comes down to it, you don’t really know anything at all about this condition that has ruined your life. Maybe you won’t die young. Maybe you’ll live a million sweeps and overthrow the hemoarchy. 

Probably you'll just get culled one night while checking on your lawn ring sprinklers, though. They'll demolish your hive and someone else will move into the space. You won't even be recorded in the culling records. Just picking up trash, removing something that never should have existed in the first place. Not an important enough deletion to even sit in one line in the rows and rows of names.

This is the other thing that came onto you about a sweep ago: a low and constant dread, a feeling that you don’t have much longer.

* * *

You dream that you are in a canyon on a distant planet, where the sunlight doesn't burn.

In this dream, there is a boy with his eyes all white. He has no horns and strange skin, and he wears a symbol you do not recognize. The sun is bright and high overhead, but it gives off only a gentle warm feeling, like sitting next to a radiator. 

The boy smiles at you. His teeth are all dull in a way that should be unattractive but isn’t. He wears the brightest clothes you’ve ever seen, not a thread of black on him.

You walk towards him, and you’re not sure why. He holds his hand out to you, palm up, and greets you like he knows you. You do not know him, but something about the gentle way he speaks buoys your heart in your chest.

Everything seems to move a little slowly in the hot air. Your hand hovers over his, hesitant, instinctively moving to meet him but unsure what to do with itself now that it’s here. He takes your hand and curls his fingers softly around it. He says something to you, laughs.

You wake up confused and heartsick.

* * *

The next night as you crawl out of your recuperacoon and to the ablution trap, you try to figure out what happened.

It was like a dream, but not quite the same. Everything was realer and sharper than any dream you’ve ever had. You could feel the rocks under your feet, the benign touch of sunlight on your skin. When you touched his hand, you could feel the softness of his palm.

You don’t know what to think of it. You dress and then head over to your husktop, which is where you spend most of your time these days, although what you’re accomplishing on it not even you can say. You open ~ATH sometimes, but it seems dull and pointless now, and you can’t feel what the appeal of trying to program ever was. You’re barely on Trollian anymore, either. You’ve stopped talking to your friends, not all at once, and not really on purpose, but over time you let more and more messages go unanswered, and you sign in less often until it’s not at all. At first it’s because you don’t feel like talking; then it’s because you don’t know what to say; and then it’s been too long and you don’t know how to start talking to them again, so you just let the application sit unopened, dreading what might be waiting inside it.

There’s a folder on your desktop that you aren’t going to look at. It’s something Sollux sent you before he died.

Well, not really him, and not really before, either. He had it set to auto-send to you if something happened to him, saying it was important and that someone should have it if he wasn’t around.

The folder is called sgrub_wip_v2a. Your first thought when you saw it was that that was a stupid name, but then you remembered that it had been named by Sollux, who was dead now, and you just felt like an asshole. It contains a bunch of ~ATH files, plus a couple more formats you don’t recognize and can’t open. You scrolled through all this code for hours after Sollux died, trying to find something in it that you could understand, what he was trying to do, what it was that made this so important. None of it meant anything to you. The functions are all unfamiliar, even more difficult to guess at the purpose of than the average ~ATH program, and you can’t find anything like them in any handbook or forum. You’ve never tried to run it, and you’ve decided you’re never going to try to.

Sollux still blinked on your Trollian contact list for a while after he died. His status was always set to online, and even after he was dead there must have been something in his hive keeping the power on, keeping that last part of him plugged in. It had stayed like that for perigees, and then one day finally flipped to offline as whatever backup power source he had running finally broke down. Even all that time later, seeing that little icon change to inactive had felt like losing the last bit of him that had stuck around, like confirmation that he was really gone.

If Sollux had been a quadrantmate, you would have been allowed to mourn. Only for a few weeks at your age, not the long periods a troll who had lost a quadrantmate of sweeps and sweeps would be allowed, but it would have been something. At your age, death is common, and not something to be loudly bemoaned. Lots of trolls die, even ones who you’ve unwisely chosen to form an association with similar to what might be called “friendship”. You can maybe feel a little sad about it and then move on.

But Sollux was not a quadrantmate, and you felt sad and empty anyway, and then the sadness didn't go away. It dragged on and on from weeks into perigees and got heavy, made a hollow inside you where it sat unmoving. Without you really realizing it, a whole sweep went by. You carry out your daily functions but feel tired all the time, your limbs heavy long after you climb out of your sopor. Everything feels muddy and flat.

Things could be worse, you try to tell yourself. At least you’re not Aradia, who was his actual quadrantmate and the one who was supposed to die in the mind control-related debacle that ended up killing him. You wonder sometimes what ended up happening to her. You wonder sometimes what happened to all the people you used to know, to everyone who existed outside of your hive, but you can’t seem to muster up the energy reach out and find out.

* * *

The next day, when you dream, you walk with the boy again.

He has a strange, short name: John. You try out the single syllable on your tongue and he smiles at you.

He already knows your name. This is not the first time he has met you, he says.

The two of you wander down alongside the rock wall and he asks you about your life. You tell him there’s not much to tell, not from someone like you, but he wants to know anyway. You tell him about your dead friend Sollux, and about your other friends who aren’t dead yet but whose lives have drifted out of your reach, and he seems to already be familiar with their names and at least parts of their stories when you mention them. You ask him why he’s here, asking you these things, why doesn’t he go manifest himself in the dreams of your more interesting friends.

He says that first of all, it doesn’t work like that, he doesn’t get to pick who shows up here with him. And second of all, even if he did get to pick, he likes being here. He likes talking to you.

* * *

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG]  began trolling grimAuxiliatrix [GA] \--

CG: KANAYA?   
CG: CAN I ASK YOU SOMETHING?   
GA: Karkat   
GA: You Havent Contacted Me In A While   
GA: Is Something Wrong   
CG: I WAS WONDERING SOMETHING.   
CG: AND YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE I KNOW WHO WOULD KNOW THE ANSWER.   
CG: IT’S ABOUT THE SUN.   
GA: The Sun   
CG: YES.   
CG: THE SUN.   
CG: WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE?   
GA: Well   
GA: I Suppose Its   
GA: Hot   
GA: Well Thats Not A Very Good Description   
GA: It Isnt Hot Like A Nutrition Preparation Surface Its A Different Kind Of Heat   
GA: It Comes From Above But The Feeling Is All Around You   
GA: Its Rather Oppressive At The Worst Point Of Noon   
GA: But Early In The Morning Or In The Evening It Can Actually Be Quite Pleasant   
GA: Why Do You Ask   
CG: JUST WONDERING.   
GA: Well In That Case   
GA: I Have My Own Question For You   
GA: Ive Been Meaning To Ask You For A While But Lately You Havent Been Answering My Messages   
GA: You Seem   
GA: I Dont Know   
GA: Off   
GA: You Havent Uttered A Single Obscenity This Entire Exchange   
GA: You Have Seemed Different For Some Time Now   
GA: Or You Did Before You Began Ignoring Every Attempt I And Everyone Else Have Made To Contact You   
GA: I Suppose My Question Is   
GA: Are You Alright   
GA: Karkat   
GA: Karkat Are You Still There   
CG: YEAH.   
CG: I'M FINE.   
CG: THANKS.

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG]  ceased trolling grimAuxiliatrix [GA] \--

* * *

You dream of the canyon again, and John is there again. He steps out from the shade, smiling. 

You’ve finally made up your mind to find out what’s going on, so you ask him: is this a dream? Who are you? Why are you here?

He tells you it’s not really a dream, not quite. He doesn’t understand all of it himself, but it’s a place where the dead and the dreaming can speak to one another.

This is a memory, he tells you. The canyon is not his memory, it’s simply a place he ended up in sort of by accident, and it seems like maybe you did too. It’s not a place meant for either of you, but you find yourselves in it all the same.

He tells you what happened to him. How he died. He’d had someone like you, a version of your life that had gone differently than this one. Then he looks a little sad and says that he doesn’t want to talk any more about dying or the people he’s left behind, and maybe you could please talk to him about something else.

You don’t know what to talk about that’s not depressing, so you cast around for a moment and then ask him if he likes movies, which you think is a very stupid attempt, but he brightens again. He asks you what movies you like, and laughs at the names, and you don’t get what’s so funny, but you like to see him laugh.

Both of you wander down along the wall of the canyon, talking for a while. The conversation meanders along with you, talking about nothing, and you find yourself unexpectedly smiling quite often. You come to a little patch of shade under an overhang of rock and pause there for a moment, suddenly quiet.

You kiss him. His lips are chapped from the desert air.

* * *

On the next night, you stay up until sunrise. You are nervous to see him again, and at the same time afraid you won’t.

You think about him all night, all the weird and captivating ways that everything about him seems different from anyone you’ve ever known. Not just because he’s not a troll, but the way that everything about him seems gentle and strange—his clothes, his teeth, his sun, his hornless head. You wonder what could make a boy so soft. Whatever world he comes from must be kinder than this one. 

Finally, it begins to get light outside, and the sun and exhaustion force you into your recuperacoon. You close your eyes and wait to find him in his sunlit canyon in his gentler world.

* * *

On the last day, he takes you to the top of the canyon. You climb up the rocks, him floating easily from perch to perch and you clambering up out of breath, but the effort to get there burns clean and honest rather than aggravating. 

The two of you crest the highest point of rock you can find and look out over the rusty landscape. You can see for miles. There are dots of scrubby brush along the ground, the shapes of mountains off on the horizon, and, in the distance, a river.

You and John stand here next to each other, your hand finding his again. 

You linger in this moment, this place where the two of you converge, suspended somewhere between alive and not. You don’t know what’s going to happen after this. Even as you dream, the world that waits for you once you wake up continues to move along into the future in ways you don’t understand.

But from here, things look okay.


End file.
